Have I Got News For You

Toby Young

Learning a few tricks from Hollywood, this interview is infinitely more tolerable if you think about Kirsten Dunst and completely rewrite the actual text.

Q1.This your first time on Have I Got News For You. Are you looking forward to it? What sort of treatment do you think you will get?

I'm a bit nervous, obviously. I suspect I'll get a bit of a kicking, but I'm hoping that Paul and Ian will be distracted by the US Presidential election results.

Q2.Your biggest successes seem to draw on your biggest failures, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People being the obvious example - do you worry you might not have anything to write about if everything goes too well?

Yes I do. I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

Q3.What is the least amount of time you've lasted in a job before getting the boot?

I was once hired to write a column for The Guardian and then got fired before I'd submitted my first one. That was unusual. Most newspapers wait until I've written at least one piece for them before firing me.

Q4.How do you think Britain and America differ in their approaches to success and failure? Has this been apparent in the reaction to your work?

America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure. In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

Q5.Graydon Carter, your editor at Vanity Fair, is reported to have said: "Those who can't teach, write. Those who can't write, write about themselves - in Toby's case, endlessly". Is that a fair comment?

I thought that was a bit rich coming from him. Back when I worked for Vanity Fair in the mid-90s, I remember being perplexed by this woman wafting around the office with an air of great self-importance. I eventually asked another member of staff what she did and it turned out she wrote Graydon's "Letter from the Editor" at the front of the magazine each month. So a more accurate rendering of that aphorism would be, "Those who can't teach, write. Those who can't write employ someone to write for them and then pass it off as their own work."

Q6.Is it true that some staff at The Modern Review used to write their name in cocaine and then snort it all?

Alas not. Section editors got paid a grand total of 1,500 pounds per annum so cocaine was a pretty scarce commodity round the office. I think someone may have once written their name with some Alphabetti Spaghetti.

Q7.You played yourself in the stage version of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. Do you have any aspirations as an actor?

Yes, I do. My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.